


Silence was golden and all, but fuck gold

by hold_on_a_sex



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Gen, Speech Disorders, stutter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 06:06:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3108863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hold_on_a_sex/pseuds/hold_on_a_sex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daryl grew up with a stutter, and managed to mostly get rid of it after moving away from his family. The stress of the events at Terminus, however, bring it back, and he's stuck in silence as he tries to hide it from the group.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silence was golden and all, but fuck gold

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I have a mild stutter, which mostly just comes out with stress, and I want to emphasize that Daryl's negativity about his stutter is based on emotional abuse. Stuttering is not wrong, and if someone doesn't want speech therapy for it, that's okay. Anyway, this is for the TWD kinkmeme, and I basically just had stuttering feelings for a little while and posted it here :)
> 
> Also, if you regularly read my other works, then A) I will be updating once I feel like I have written something good enough because I'm sort of anxious about it, and B) please be proud I managed to write something that is self-contained and won't go on forever because that's an accomplishment

When Daryl was seven, he went to his first speech therapy session. His teacher had pulled him out of class and sent him down to the special room by the nurse’s office that Merle said the stupid kids went to, and a smiling woman with brown hair, red lipstick, and a too-cheerful voice had gotten out special cards with words and pictures and asked him to talk. He said a few of the words, but clammed up pretty quickly. The woman never stopped smiling, but she kept telling him that his words were bumpy when they were supposed to be smooth. He knew that doing something wrong was bad, so he decided not to do it at all. After half an hour, the smiling woman sighed and sent him back to class.

That night, at home, his father yelled at him. The school had called because they wanted family involvement in speech therapy, and if Daryl would _just fucking talk right_ this wouldn’t be a problem. Dixons and authority did not mix well. Daryl wasn’t sure what his father said to the principal when he took him to school the next day, but he wasn’t pulled out of class again.

Daryl tried to do some sort of speech therapy of his own at home, but he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. All that had happened was that the lady had told him when he sounded wrong, and he already knew when that happened. When Merle was out of the house, throwing bricks through windows of old buildings and smoking cigarettes with all his friends, Daryl would shut himself in their shared bedroom and whisper the words to himself. _Snake_. _Food_. _Math_. He couldn’t remember many of the words that had been on the flash cards, so he made his own little list in his head of words he couldn’t say right. Every day the list grew, but he focused on the words he said the most at home. At school, people laughed at him and teachers looked at him with sad eyes, but there were real consequences when he said things wrong at home. He didn’t like getting hit, not one bit, and after months of trying and failing with his own speech therapy, he decided that shutting up was probably a good plan for the rest of his life.

The problem with never talking, though, was that when he did talk, it was worse. Sometimes he would start a sentence okay, but once he got stuck on one little word, it all went downhill. By the time he got to high school, he was nearly completely silent. He skipped classes to smoke behind the buildings most of the time anyway, and when he was there, he was happy to sit in the back and let the teachers assume he was a deadbeat stoner. The stoner kids never talked in class, except maybe to laugh at something that wasn’t really funny, and Daryl blended into the background as just another fuck up kid, falling through the cracks of a large, uncaring school system. It worked that way.

* * *

Two years into his job at the auto shop, his supervisor pulled him aside. “Dixon,” the man began, waiting until he got a nod before he continued, “Look, I know it ain’t really my business, but there’s talk in the town ‘bout your family, and it ain’t nice. I’m bettin’ they didn’t let you do jack shit with doctors when you were a kid, right? I’ve heard you talk a little, and… I know we ain’t much, here, but the insurance we give you is pretty good. You could probably find you someone to help. One of them speech therapists fixed up my kid’s lisp real good.”

Daryl nodded sharply, just once. “Th-th-th-th…” he trailed off, and just gave his boss an awkward attempt at a smile. The man seemed to understand, and spared Daryl the pain of trying to finish the word that was caught somewhere between his brain and his mouth.

This time around, the therapy seemed to do something. After reading some of the stuff his new speech therapist, Ian, gave him, he pieced together that part of it was probably that he wasn’t living with his family anymore. Constantly being punished for messing up didn’t really help stuttering, and nor did any sort of stress, and fuck if his family life growing up hadn’t been stressful. His speech slowly started to smooth out, and after a long while, most words actually made it past his lips without a problem. While replies tended to go well, he couldn’t really start a conversation from silence without stuttering a little; it didn’t matter that much, though, because after all his years of silence, he wasn’t the type to start a conversation anyway.

He probably could have been relatively stutter-free for the rest of his life, if it hadn’t been for the world deciding to go and fucking end on him. For a while, he managed to employ all the little tricks that his (probably dead, now that he thought of it) speech therapist had taught him, but, like everyone else on the planet, Daryl Dixon had a breaking point.

* * *

Daryl sat alone on a pew, glad that his glower was keeping people way the hell away from him. He couldn’t even express his feelings in his own mind, and he knew that all that would come out to the others would be a flurry of violence and hate, if only because he had never had any other way to express fear. He’d been tied up, gagged, threatened, and nearly killed along with all of his friends, and he felt jumpy and cold inside.

“Daryl?” came a tentative voice. Carol. While he cared for her, more than he cared for most people, he didn’t want to talk to her.

He opened his mouth to hiss a harsh reply and send her away, but nothing came out.

He took a breath and tried to start a different sentence, hoping it was a word he was hung up on, but no dice. All that came out was a quiet, repeated “t” noise of the angry “the fuck you want” he was trying to say.

Carol didn’t seem to notice, since his head was bowed and she wasn’t trying to see his face, but she knew he heard her and probably figured he was just giving her the silent treatment. “We know you’re upset, but you need to eat. I know you don’t like talkin’ about feelings or any of that, but Rick and the others who were there with you understand what you went through.”

“Don’t,” Daryl finally managed, after starting and failing a few words. How was this happening again? He couldn’t seem _weak_ in front of this group, and that’s what this was. Weakness. Everything Ian had told him about stuttering had flown out of his mind with the utter panic of it all coming back to him. Instead of the calm lessons from Ian, his father’s screams rang in his head. _Fucking pussy can’t even get a damn word out right; you should’a shoved a coat hanger up there when you found out you was pregnant_. It had taken years before Daryl had understood what his father had meant by that particular diatribe that had been directed to his mother, but it still haunted him. He had learned from a very early age that his family, or at least his father and probably his brother, would far rather he not exist than talk the way he had. While he didn’t like everyone he was with--though that was starting to be less true, the more time he spent with these weirdoes--he needed them, and he wasn’t going to risk them seeing him as weak, useless, or better off dead.

Though he wanted to avoid the others, it was impossible to do in the small church, and he stood up and stalked over to the area next to the altar where there was food. Glaring at the minister, who looked like he might try to comfort Daryl, with his oh-so-sympathetic face, the redneck snatched up a small bag of pretzels, ripping it open and eating them quickly, all the while trying to convey as much anger as possible through pure body language so that people would stay away.

“Hey, man, you need to calm down,” Glenn said, appearing by his shoulder. “I know that we just went through some heavy shit, but we’re safe now and you’re freaking people out.” The younger man tried to give Daryl a smile, but it faltered under the icy glare. “We almost got killed, but we didn’t. We found Carol again, and she saved us, and Rick has his baby again. If you’re going to be this angry, do it in a corner or something so you don’t ruin his family reunion.”

Daryl was itching to tell Glenn that he was fine, and just needed some rest, or even the mutter a cruel comment about Rick’s seeming unending luck with being reunited with his family against all odds, but he kept his mouth shut and just nodded, taking his pretzels with him and going to the edge of the room to sit in silence, letting the others celebrate as he silently panicked.

* * *

“Daryl,” Rick called out quietly, jogging a little to catch up to his friend. “There are some bad people out there, brother. Nobody should go out alone. I’ll set the snares with you.”

_Stay here, ‘cause your kids shouldn’t lose their Dad if I get attacked_ , Daryl yearned to say, but he just shrugged. He was surprised to realize how much he wanted to say. As a kid, he had been so used to silence that he tended not to think about things to say, but after so many years without his stutter, Daryl had grown used to speaking his mind and now felt a little trapped being unable to. Silence was golden and all, but fuck gold. He wanted to express his opinion. That said, he wasn’t going to risk his reputation as competent, and maybe his place in the group, by showing his weakness. If Rick wanted to leave his kids and maybe risk getting eaten by some fucked-up cannibals, that was his own (terrible) choice.

With a grunt, Daryl just turned and led the way into the woods, listening as Rick trudged along behind him.

Rick was used to how quiet Daryl was after spending so many months around the redneck, even counting the younger man as his closest friend for quite some time, but he felt that their walk was even quieter than usual. “You okay?” he asked after ten minutes in which Daryl hadn’t said a word. “Look, man, I know that everything at Terminus was really bad, and if you need to talk about it so you can move on, I’m right here, and… nobody’s around right now, so nobody’s gotta know,” he finished awkwardly, having somewhat expected Daryl to cut him off with a derisive snort partway through his offer.

“N-n-n… n-n-n…” Daryl chewed at his lip, hoping that he was being quiet enough that Rick wouldn’t hear his failed attempts at starting a sentence. “I d-d-d-don-don-don… talk ‘bout i-i-i-i-i-it.”

“Are you…” Rick paused. “You don’t sound okay, man.”

Daryl whipped around and glared at Rick, holding his crossbow and trying to make himself look as large and intimidating as possible. “St-st-st-st… st-st-st… go.” He jerked his chin back in the direction they had come from, wishing Rick would just leave him alone.

Tentatively, Rick reached out and put a hand on Daryl’s shoulder. The redneck stiffened, clearly uncomfortable, but didn’t shove Rick or even step away, so the older man decided that it was going pretty well. “This is why you’ve haven’t talked in days,” he said slowly, finally figuring out Daryl’s extreme silence. “Did it start after Terminus?”

Jaw clenched, Daryl shook his head. He couldn’t figure this out. Rick wasn’t a speech therapist who got paid to be nice about stutters, so why wasn’t he yelling at Daryl or making fun of him? None of this made sense. “H-h-h-had it for most of my, my, my, my, my life,” he got out, wishing he could communicate faster. “It was gone for te-te-te-te-ten years, bu-bu-bu-bu-bu…” He stopped, exhaling angrily.

“Terminus brought it back,” Rick said, getting a nod from his friend in confirmation. “Makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. Carl started bitin’ his nails again, and Glenn’s barely sleepin’, just like after Merle and the Governor had him and Maggie. Look, I get that you feel bad about it, even if that is dumb shit you probably got from your family, but you’re my best friend and I need your help with decisions sometimes. And even if you aren’t gonna talk, please stop glarin’ at everyone. Carl thinks you hate him now.” Rick patted Daryl’s shoulder soothingly when the younger man looked guilty. “I don’t care if you stutter and nobody else will either, but it’s your choice.”

“I won’t gl-gl-gla-gla… look at Carl li-li-li-li-li…” Daryl stopped talking and just nodded at Rick, hoping the other man got what he was saying. “C-c-can we fuckin’ hunt n-n-n-n-n-now? People are hung… hung… hungry.”


End file.
